Callahan stood behind the mound, his clipboard forgotten at his side, his mouth open, his loud voice, for once, completely silent.
Chapter 10: The Video
Maya Torres had filmed the whole thing. She had filmed Davon at the fence, asking to be put in. She had filmed Callahan's laughter, and Davon's quiet diagnosis, and the joke tryout, and the three perfect pitches, and the eruption that followed. She had filmed it the way she filmed everything: steadily, honestly, without commentary, letting the moment speak for itself. That night, sitting on her bedroom floor with her phone in her lap, she trimmed the clip to the best ninety seconds, added a simple caption, and posted it.
"Davon from the fence. Three pitches. Watch this."
She did not expect much. She expected her friends to see it, and maybe a few kids from school, and then it would fade, the way most phone videos faded. Instead, by the time she brushed her teeth, the clip had been shared twenty times. By the time she got into bed, it had been shared a hundred. By morning, it was everywhere.
Davon found out from his phone, which buzzed so many times during breakfast that Rose finally took it away from him and set it face down on the kitchen table.
"Davon Mitchell, what in the world is happening on that thing?" she asked, her eyebrows raised.
"I don't know, Grandma," Davon said honestly. "I think Maya posted a video."
Rose handed the phone back, and Davon scrolled, his stomach sinking as the numbers climbed. The clip had been shared by kids from school, by parents from the park, by a local sports page, and by people he had never met, who left comments in a language of fire emojis and exclamation marks. Some of the comments were kind. "That kid's got an arm!" one said. "Give him a real chance!" said another. "Best thing I've seen all summer," said a third, and Davon felt a warm, embarrassed glow at those.
Other comments were not kind. "Stunt," one man wrote. "Callahan set it up for attention." Another said, "Three pitches don't make a pitcher. Let's see him do it in a real game." A third, crueller, said, "He's just a mower boy. He'll be back to mowing by next week." Davon read that one twice, and then he put the phone down, because reading it a third time would not make it hurt less.
At the library the next day, where Davon went to return the pitching book and hide for a while, kids he barely knew stopped him to ask if he was the boy from the video. Some wanted an autograph, which embarrassed him deeply. Some wanted to know if he was going to be famous. Some just stared, as if he had changed overnight from a quiet boy into a different person entirely. Davon did not feel different. He felt like the same boy, with the same work boots, and the same wall behind his house, and the sudden attention felt like a coat that did not fit.
Maya found him after lunch by the library steps, and she apologised at once, her face anxious. "I'm sorry, Davon. I didn't think it would blow up like that. I just thought people should see what you did. I didn't think about the mean comments."
Davon shook his head. "It's not your fault. You filmed the truth. People just do what people do with the truth. They argue about it."
"But are you okay?" Maya asked, and her voice was serious, the way it had been at the fence, when she had kept filming while everybody laughed.
"I don't know," Davon admitted. "I liked it better when nobody was watching, except you and the wall. Now everybody's watching, and I don't know what they want from me. I just threw three pitches. That's all I did."
That evening, back at the duplex, Rose cooked fried chicken and greens, the way she always did when Davon needed comfort without a lecture. She did not ask about the video, not at first. She just set the table, poured the sweet tea, and waited until Davon was ready to talk. When he finally did, telling her about the comments, kind and cruel, she listened the way she always listened, fully, without interrupting, and then she said, "Attention is a loud thing, baby. It comes fast, and it goes fast. What stays is what you do when nobody's filming. Remember that."
Davon nodded, and he thought about the wall, and the tennis ball, and the mornings when nobody had watched. He thought about Cody, and Marcus, and Callahan, and the scouts with their notepad and tablet, and he wondered what would happen next, and whether the video would open a door or just make a noise. His phone buzzed again on the kitchen counter, another share, another comment, another stranger with an opinion, and Davon left it there, uneasy, not yet famous, and not at all sure he wanted to be.